Motivational Quotes

Poetry and poets

There is only beauty -- and it has only one perfect expression -- poetry. All the rest is a lie --except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.

- Mallarme, Stephane

Best Quotes about Poetry and poets

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Frost, Robert

Poetry is life distilled.

Brooks, Gwendolyn

Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.

Cocteau, Jean

Poetry, the genre of purest beauty, was born of a truncated woman: her head severed from her body with a sword, a symbolic penis.

Dworkin, Andrea

Every old poem is sacred.

Horace

Poets wish to profit or to please.

Horace

Poets are born, not paid.

Mizner, Addison

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.

Eliot, T. S.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you --like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist --or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

10.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.

Field, Eugene

12.

This poem will never reach its destination. [On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity]

Voltaire

13.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Lowell, James Russell

14.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Diderot, Denis

15.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Keats, John

16.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

Hubbard, Elbert

17.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Woolf, Virginia

18.

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

Dickinson, Emily

19.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Marquis, Don

20.

The job of the poet is to render the world -- to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Doren, Mark Van

21.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth -- the true poet is very near the oracle.

Chapin, Edwin Hubbel

22.

We all write poems. It is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Fowles, John

23.

A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it.

White, Elwyn Brooks

24.

In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature. What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself --as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony --those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a read, commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.

Brodsky, Joseph

25.

Of all great poems, love is the absolute and essential foundation.

Fitzhugh, C.

26.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Ackerman, Diane

27.

Poetry is the special medium of spiritual crazy wisdom, the form of expression that comes closest to creating a bridge between words and what is wordless.

Nisker, Wes ''Scoop''

28.

Mallarme, Stephane

29.

Poetry doesn't belong to those who write it, but to thosewho need it.

30.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Fitzgerald, Robert

31.

As to Don Juan, confess that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing; it may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?

Byron, Lord

32.

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

Ashbery, John

33.

Poetry is what is lost in translation.

Frost, Robert

34.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Plath, Sylvia

35.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Auden, W. H.

36.

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

Fenton, James

37.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Flaubert, Gustave

38.

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.

Aristotle

39.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Aristotle

40.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Voltaire

42.

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle

43.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

44.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

Bacon, Francis

45.

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

Frye, Northrop

46.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

Cocteau, Jean

47.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Horace

48.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

49.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

Drew, Elizabeth

50.

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.

Massinger, Philip